gathatoulie live

... some of the mental equipment a man orders his visual experience
with is variable, and much of this variable equipment is culturally
relative, in the sense of being determined by the society which has
influenced his experience. Among these variables are categories with
which he classifies his visual stimuli, the knowledge he will use to
supplement what his immediate vision gives him, and the attitude he
will adopt to the kind of artificial object seen. The beholder must
use on the painting such visual skills as he has, very few of which
are normally special to painting, and he is likely to use those skills
his society esteems highly. The painter responds to this; his
public's visual capacity must be his medium. Whatever his own
specialized professional skills, he is himself a member of the society
he works for and shares its visual experience and habit. - "Painting
and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy", by M. Baxandall, quoted by
Clifford Geertz in "Art as a Cultural System"

alterations

Connoisseurs of the Russian novel could have foretold with certainty
that this fresh, still youthful novel would lose its harmony before
thirty years had passed; it would "spread", that the thick cover would
become puffy, and that wrinkles would very soon appear upon the
fronticepiece and round the colophon; the texture of the pages would
grow coarse and smudged perhaps--in fact, that
it was only a novel of the moment, the fleeting novel which is so
often read by Russian women.

- Dostoyevsky (with modifications), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html

Venus Infers

"In order to make up our minds we must know how we feel about things;
and to know how we feel about things we need the public images of
sentiment that only ritual, myth, and art can provide." - Clifford
Geertz, "The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind", p. 82 in
"The Interpretation of Cultures" (2000)

le penseur

"As jumping a stream in order to find out if it is jumpable is on a
higher sophistication-level than jumping to get to the other side so
exploring is on a higher sophistication-level than piloting, which in
its turn is on a higher sophistication-level than following a pilot's
lead. Similarly, Euclid trying to find the proof of a new theorem is
working on a higher accomplishment-level than Euclid trying to teach
students his proof when he has got it; and trying to teach it is a
task on a higher accomplishment-level than that on which his students
are working in trying to master it.

None the less it may still be true that the only thing that, under its
thinnest description, Euclid is here and now doing is muttering to
himself a few geometrical words and phrases, or scrawling on paper or
in the sand a few rough and fragmentary lines. This is far, very far
from being all that he is doing; but it may very well be the only
thing that he is doing. A statesman signing his surname to a
peace-treaty is doing much more than inscribe the seven letters of his
surname, but he is not doing many or any more things. He is bringing a
war to a close by inscribing the seven letters of his surname." -
Gilbert Ryle, 1968